Guest post by Zukiswa Zimela, IPS AfricaGrowing up as a little girl in rural Bizana in the Eastern Cape of South Africa I had no interest in soccer. I spent most of my time playing house, baking mud pies to nurture my stick children I had lovingly wrapped in plastic blankets. This was perfectly normal and acceptable because I learnt how to be a “proper girl” the traditional way.(more…)

As I struggled to find something interesting or at least a bit fun to write about this week while using little distractions to avoid the inevitable putting of pen to paper, something landed in my email in box that made me go “aha!”. ‘How deep is your love for you?’ the email questioned and offered to provide the answers in a one day self help seminar. Here was another opportunity at self improvement that many of us are fascinated with and possibly even addicted to at the moment.

In sub-Saharan Africa, married women are at high risk of contracting HIV. Photo credit: Petr Kratochvil www.publicdomainpictures.net

A good friend sent me an interesting academic article last week that got me quite excited. Entitled ‘Shona Womanhood: Rethinking Social Identities in the Face of HIV and AIDS in Zimbabwe’, the article really hit home on an issue that we all know is out there for most African women; the cultural definition of a “good woman” as a married woman with children, and the impact this has at a time when the highest HIV infection rates are among married women, for well known reasons related to definitions of masculinity in our cultural contexts.

The author, Pascah Mugwini, writing in The Journal of Pan African Studies (vol.2 no.4, June 2008), points out that Shona women outside marriage are much safer from infection than those within because “there are no constricting cultural norms barring her from negotiating safer sex once she decides to have it”. He also points out that there is more stigma now in having been widowed as a result of HIV than there is in being a single woman.(more…)

I can’t bear to read anything about female genital mutilation. Of all the forms of gender-based violence, this one disturbs me more than any other and I struggle to understand why anyone, male or female, would subject a child or another adult to this form of torture.

Religion or culture, as far as I am concerned are not any kind of excuses and there can be no justification for this practice. My heart breaks when my children get hurt in any small way so I wonder at the power of patriarchy to make women, who have themselves experienced its horrors, act as the gatekeepers of this harmful practice and subject their own daughters to the same.(more…)

Simple things sometimes seem the most difficult to accept. We protest that the hardest place to tackle gender inequity is in the privacy of the home and then we spend little or no time in our work on women’s rights, feminism and masculinities examining the area where we interact most in the home - in the raising of our children.(more…)

Not everyone is able to have a biological child. Credit: Kirstin Paliza/IPS

Guest Blogger Tapuwa Ayeh

Like many women, I have always wanted to be a mother and motherhood was supposed to be part of my life journey. Well life is not always going to be what you planned. For years, I went through a painful emotional journey of trying to get pregnant, and alas, failing at every attempt.

This blog brings out the flavour of gender issues, from the network of IPS writers and friends. Gender Masala is part of the Inter Press Service project Communicating for Change: Getting Voice, Visibility and Impact for Gender Equality. Check it at www.ips.org/mdg3/